Strange Meeting
by Neon Kitsune
Summary: Two brothers who hunt evil meet...two brothers who hunt evil.  Gen.  Rated for language and violence.
1. Black Eyed Baby

May include spoilers through _White Night_ for the Dresden Files and 3x8 "A Very Supernatural Christmas" for _Supernatural_.

I don't own any of these boys, more's the pity, and if I did I'd be nicer to them.

* * *

><p>"I've finally got it," Thomas said with no preamble. His voice was low but taut with excitement. "I've tracked the sucker to its lair."<p>

I felt myself sit up straight in my office chair. "The black-eyed thing?" I demanded.

"Got it in one," my brother said. "Write down the address and get here as soon as you can."

I scrabbled for a piece of paper and a pen, propping the phone between my ear and my shoulder. "OK, go," I said. He recited the address, verified I had it right, and hung up without another word.

I spent just a few seconds wallowing in a feeling of triumph. We'd been having trouble with the thing, whatever it was, on and off for literally years. It would show up, hurt or kill a few people, and then vanish again, and when it was gone it was _gone_—not a rumor, not a hint, not even a feeling. I thought perhaps it lived in the Nevernever and only came out to hunt; Thomas thought it hibernated between feedings. All we had to go on was theory and what little we could get out of the couple witnesses it had left, because no one had any clue what it was; even Bob had admitted ignorance, and Bob almost literally knew everything. It looked human, except that its eyes went solid black when it wanted to frighten someone. It liked to hurt people before it killed them. Sometimes it seemed to be able to move between places instantly, though never with any evidence of a portal into the Nevernever to account for it. Murphy's people had it down as a serial killer, of course, which was technically accurate if not entirely complete.

And now, at last, we had a bead on it.

I sped through collecting my gear. Fortunately morning rush hour was petering out, so it didn't take forever to get to the address Thomas had given me. I was kind of surprised at the area; mostly critters picking a spot to hole up went for the parts of town where everyone minded their own business, but this one had picked the kind of neighborhood where they still had block parties. My car stuck out like a crow at a bluebird convention among the minivans and station wagons—though I had to admit, there weren't many places where an ancient Volkswagen Beetle in all the colors of the automotive rainbow looked at home. Not that Thomas's huge, shiny SUV fit in much better. I pulled up behind the monstrosity, almost forgetting to set the parking brake in my eagerness to get to Thomas.

The address was a tidy house that reminded me of Murphy's place, though it was larger. I felt out of place as I hiked up the neat sidewalk, but I wasn't going to let that stop me. I'd just put my foot on the first of the porch steps when the front door opened and my brother beckoned me inside. A woman stood behind him, looking way too excited and just a little nervous.

"Harry," Thomas said. "You made good time. Janet, this is my partner Harry Dresden." I nodded at the woman, feeling the need to have a hat to tip at her. I raised an eyebrow at Thomas, but it was pretty clear where he was going with our cover.

"I'm assuming the guy's not holed up in this house," I said.

"Next street over," Thomas said. "I decided it'd be better to not have you pulling up across the street. Your car's...distinctive." In the pause I clearly heard "a piece of crap", but I decided to ignore it, just this once.

I switched my attention to Janet, who was practically vibrating with interest. "Ma'am, I'm sorry we intruded on your home," I said. "We've been looking for this person for a long time. We won't be here long."

"Oh, no, it's fine!" she said, sounding worryingly enthusiastic. "It's kind of exciting, really. I mean, my house, being used as a stakeout. This is the kind of thing you see in the movies." I had a feeling that wasn't all there was to it, given the way she kept stealing glances at Thomas as she spoke.

My half-brother looks a little like me, in the sense that we could both be described as tall, pale, dark-haired and in good shape, but Thomas has the kind of looks models envy-and a bit of an unfair advantage. He's a vampire of the White Court, and they don't feed off blood but emotion; specifically, they eat lust. Thomas is literally supernaturally sexy. He can't turn it off, which can make things a little inconvenient, but sometimes it's useful. For example, it can help him talk a woman into letting two strangers use her house as a stakeout point.

*...*...*

We didn't stay long. Janet had told us that she didn't know much about the person who lived in our target house; they were a close-knit neighborhood, but amazingly willing to let the quiet keep to themselves. She'd never even seen our target, only heard what little gossip there was, which amounted to nothing of practical use. So we thanked her and left her house by the front door again to circle into the narrow alley that led between the back yards.

As we approached the property, I began to feel something just a little off. It was hard to describe, a tingle of a power that felt familiar and strange at the same time. I glanced at Thomas to ask if he felt it too, and discovered I didn't have to; he looked unsettled.

"There's something not right here," he muttered.

"No kidding."

"It feels familiar."

"Yeah, me too," I said. We reached the wooden fence that enclosed the backyard. I spent a few moments feeling for active guardian spells, but found nothing to explain the itch of power.

"I'm not getting anything," I said.

"Then what is this?" Thomas asked.

I sighed. "I'll take a better look. Could you stand behind me?" I love Thomas, and it's not his fault that he's a vampire. But things you see with your Sight, you never forget, and I didn't really want to know what my brother looked like when nothing was hidden. It was possible he'd look just like himself, of course, which didn't bear thinking about.

Once he was out of my line of sight, I concentrated enough to let my Sight open. Most things looked the same, though now I could See the currents of power that run through the world anywhere people live and some places they don't. The tendrils of power the neighborhood generated were less chaotic than usual, because they were drawn to the steady thrum of a ley line that ran through the house. It was a minor line at best, though it'd be handy for anything that used magic—like, say, me—if things got exciting. But that wasn't the interesting part.

The house was covered in symbols that glowed in my Sight with a cool blue-white light. Like the power I felt, they were both familiar and strange; it was like listening to a rock song being played by a string quartet, like meeting the fraternal twin of someone I knew well. They all seemed to be sigils of warding, but not against mundane threats.

And behind them, in the heart of the house, there was darkness.

I let my Sight close. "This is seriously freaky," I said. "There's no threshold, so it's not technically living in there. The house is warded like nobody's business, all right, but it's not going to be a problem for us." Thomas made an inquiring sound. "The warding...I'm not positive, but it looks to me like it's warded against _angels_."

Thomas looked deeply skeptical. I shrugged at him. "OK," he said. "Is there an alarm system?"

"If there is, it won't last through first contact with me," I said.

"Point," Thomas said.

We eased the gate open. The yard had no cover, so we shrugged and just crossed it, quickly. The back door was naturally locked, but the lock was nothing special and it took only a few moments of fiddling to pop it.

Thomas had his gun out, held to his side to keep it out of casual view just in case. I went through the door first, my blasting rod held out. The door opened into a kitchen; I stepped to the side so Thomas could come level with me. As he did, however, he let out a grunt and doubled over as if someone had punched him in the stomach.

"Agh," he said clearly, and fell forward. I dropped my staff and tried to catch him, and he got his hands out in time to keep from breaking his nose on the floor. I dragged him away from the door and swung it shut to keep out prying eyes.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

He opened his eyes, and I gulped. They were silver, allover silver with no visible pupils, which meant that something was encouraging his vampire nature. But even as I watched they faded to white, then further towards normal. "Nothing, now," he said. "Something got me, right at the door there." I looked, but there didn't seem to be anything except a doormat. Thomas's fall had disarranged it, but I could make out a subtle pattern on it. A pattern that looked familiar in much the same way the sigils on the outside of the house had, now that I took a closer look. I made sure my brother was propped up and reached over to spread the mat out.

The design was a five-pointed star in a circle, with extra squiggles spaced around inside the figure. "What the hell is that supposed to do?" Thomas asked, sounding mildly curious.

"You got me," I said. "If I had to guess, I'd go for warding against demons."

"Which is why it hit me," Thomas said. I just nodded. He didn't like to be reminded of the thing that lived inside him-it made him stronger, but as far as he was concerned it also made him a monster. I disagreed. "Not very useful, though," he continued after a moment. "I feel fine now."

"Maybe it's meant for the kind of demon that walks around in its own body," I said, and turned to help Thomas to his feet. "Yours is a little shielded by, well, you."

"What a lovely thought," Thomas said. "I think we can assume it's not in here right now," he continued, dropping the subject of his personal demon with an audible thud. "It would have heard us."

"We should still be careful," I said. "Who knows what other fun it's got set up in here?" We took a moment to look around the kitchen. It seemed normal-all the usual appliances in place-but as far as I could tell none of them were plugged in; there were no glowing lights, no digital clock on the microwave, and no humming from the refrigerator. The kitchen was set up to escape casual curiosity, but not to be functional.

We swept through the house cautiously, but found nothing else except living room furniture in the same camouflage vein as the kitchen and bare rooms upstairs. I was standing contemplating the trapdoor to the attic when Thomas sighed. "You know it's not up there," he said gloomily. "I can feel it. It's in the basement."

"I hate evil basements," I said. My apartment is in the basement, and my lab's below that, so I can't hate basements in general.

"Me too," he said.

We trooped down the stairs and found the basement door with no trouble. I aimed my blasting rod at it while Thomas pulled it open from the side so neither of us was silhouetted. Nothing happened. It was dark down there. The light switch was close by, so I flicked it. Again, nothing happened. "Great," I said. I pulled my pentacle amulet out from under my shirt and over my head, wound the chain in the hand that held my staff, and sent a trickle of will flowing through it. It began to glow, with a light that was almost the same color as the angel-sigils on the outside of the house. "OK, dark evil basement, here we come," I muttered.

We went down slowly and cautiously. The light from my pentacle showed nothing much at first, just the stairs leading down with a right angle turn halfway. Once we made that turn, though, we could see the whole thing.

It was a finished basement, or had been. Now, the carpet and walls were covered in dark brown splotches and there were pieces of equipment whose exact nature I was queasily sure I didn't want to know. I was pretty sure most of them incorporated shackles, for one thing. A few items were covered with canvas dropcloths, two table- or cabinet-like things and something thin leaning against one wall whose cover was actually on a curtain rod.

"Great. We found where it kills people," I said. "Once we get it we'll have to point Murphy's crew at this address." I was trying hard to hold on to my breakfast. The smell was subtle, but undeniable, and the feeling was worse. This was where the darkness was coming from.

"We should check and make sure it doesn't have a tunnel into the wall," Thomas said. "That could be where it hides."

"Yeah, I'm not seeing anything that looks like a recent portal into the Nevernever," I agreed. Thomas strode over to the curtain on the wall and swept it aside.

Behind it was something that looked like every science-fiction movie's version of a forcefield ever. It was greenish, and glowed softly, and the surface rippled a bit.

And as we stood there, wondering what to do now, someone on the other side of it began to scream.


	2. A Night on the Town

I kind of like big cities.

In a little town, if you get kicked out of the bar, you're done for the night. In a city, well, you just go find the next bar. You don't have to worry that the one hot chick in the place is going to turn you down, because if she does there's another place, or even another hot chick. In a city, my biggest problem is usually finding a place to park my baby.

Because that's another thing I like about cities: weird stuff tends to stay away from them. I don't know why; maybe too many witnesses. And for exactly that reason, I don't get to spend much time in big cities.

My brother Sam and I were in Chicago in the cold gray week after New Year's trying to track down a lead he thought he had on the demon who owned my soul. It killed me to watch him trying so hard to get me out of the deal I'd made, when I could feel in my bones that there just wasn't any loophole. He thought it was his fault, because I'd made the deal in the first place to save his life. I kept trying to tell him that I knew what I was doing when I did it, but that didn't stop him.

If all this sounds crazy, be glad. It means you're not the kind of person who sees the weird shit that's behind the normal part of the world.

We'd spent a couple of days trying to track down Sam's lead, but in the end it had petered out. Then I let him mope for one night—one thing about my brother, he can mope on a practically Olympic level—and the next night I took him out, over his protests. I kind of guilted him into it, a combo of "we need some cash" and "I just want to have a little fun (before I die)", but hey, whatever works. A guy's got to look out for his little brother, even when the little brother's four inches taller.

So we went to a bar. We spent the first part of the evening enhancing our cash supply by letting drunk fratboys think we were worse at pool than we really were. We didn't even have to get in anybody's face about it; the first couple groups didn't realize they'd been hustled, and the one guy who did in the last group sized up me and Sam, took in the fact that two of his buddies were practically weaving, and decided to write off the loss. After that we switched bars, in case the guy got dumber as he got drunker, because most people do.

I give Sammy a hard time for being no fun, but really his problem is that he worries. When he forgets to worry, he's great to hang with. Of course it's tough to make him forget lately, what with four months till D-day hanging over our heads, but sometimes I manage.

That night he didn't make me work at it. We talked and laughed, and when the girl in the blue top went by and gave me a look he didn't even roll his eyes. So when she came back I reached out and tugged on her sleeve. She had two drinks in her hands, which was a good sign.

"Hi," I said. "I'm Dean." I was feeling no particular need to get fancy.

"I'm Chris," she said. "I haven't seen you guys in here before." She put some seriously nice subtext on it about how she'd have noticed.

"We're not in town long." It's always better to let them know up front that there's not gonna be a second date.

"Long enough, I hope," she said, and this time Sammy did roll his eyes, but I totally didn't care.

"At least the next, say, eighteen hours or so."

Chris laughed. "Look, I have to take these back to my friend." She gestured with the glasses at another girl, this one in a red dress that left just enough to the imagination to make it interesting.

"We've got extra seats, bring her over here," Sam put in. I was kind of surprised he was getting into the spirit of things.

"Sure, I'll—oh, crap," Chris said, her voice turning annoyed.

"What?" I asked. Sam and I turned to look at the other girl. Some guy was talking to her, and she didn't look happy about it.

"That guy's been bugging Liz all night," she said. Before the sentence was quite finished Sam was swinging off his stool. "I'm on it," he said over his shoulder.

My little brother has a chivalrous streak.

There was no way to hear the conversation over the noise in the place, so I kept an eye on the body language just in case. The other guy wasn't a pipsqueak; on the other hand Sam's six-four, and he knows how to use it when he has to. Within a minute he and Liz were back at our table.

From there the evening picked up. I was pretty busy talking to Chris, but it seemed clear that Sammy wasn't going to have any problems sealing the deal with Liz if he wanted to—and I was pretty sure he wanted to. I mean, the way he and I live practically in each others' hip pockets, I know some things about him I'd rather not, but take it from me: your right hand is just no substitute.

When the crowd started thinning out we decided to move the party to Chris and Liz's place. Chris and I went to get the Impala. It took us a few minutes to get to where I'd parked because we kept having to stop and kiss. I was tempted as hell to just put her in the back seat and get down to business, but I could just picture the bitchface I'd get from Sammy if we took that long. I settled for leaning her on the passenger door and letting my hands roam a little, till we were both breathing hard. She called me a bastard when I stopped, but she was laughing.

When we came around the corner to the street the bar was on, it was clear something was wrong. When we'd left, Liz had had Sammy up against the wall and was searching for his tonsils; now neither of them was anywhere to be seen. I pulled up to the curb fast and hopped out, calling for Sam. Chris got out too; before she could speak I heard Sam's voice from the alley nearby.

No one looks _good_ under streetlights and neon, but I've seen Sam hurt often enough to know when someone's rung his chimes for him. He was only half sitting up and his eyes weren't too focused. As soon as he registered I was there he said urgently, "The guy, the one from inside. He's got Liz." Chris gasped behind me.

"Seriously?" I said, using sarcasm to cover the worry. "You let that guy get the drop on you?" I started to help him sit up, checking for hidden injury as I did.

"Dean. His eyes were black," Sam said.

Ah, _crap_.

"Did he have a car?" I asked. I couldn't think of any other really good way of tracking down a demon in a city the size of Chicago, but at least Sammy might be able to get into the DMV records.

"I'm calling 911," Chris announced, and opened her little purse. I let Sam go, which fortunately he was steady enough for, and got a hand over her phone right before she hit the first button. Her eyes flew from the phone to my face, and she looked startled and the beginnings of scared…of me.

"We can't call the cops," I said, hoping that using "we" would reassure her.

"What are you talking about?" she demanded. I like a girl who gets pissed when she gets scared. "Liz has been kidnapped, what the hell _else_ can we do?"

"The police don't know what they'd be dealing with," Sam said, finally back in the game. Or at least on his feet, which was all I had time to wait for.

"And, what—you do?" Chris said.

"Yeah," I said. I hoped I didn't sound as tired as I felt. It's like the universe fucking hates Winchesters, seriously. Can't even take my brother out for a night on the town without running into some demon. "Look, Chris, we can find Liz, we can help her, but if we call the cops someone's just going to get hurt. It's kind of hard to explain—"

"Well you better explain, because if you don't I'm calling the police!" Chris brandished her phone like a weapon. I threw Sam a glance. Dealing with the Big Reveal was his job. "You can start with why it matters that his eyes were black."

Sam hung his head for a moment and I felt a little pang. Telling people about the real world always kind of sucks, because after that…well, they were never as safe as they thought, but once you tell them they _know_ about it. The ones who get scared aren't the ones to worry about, though. The ones that get mad are, because they're the ones who end up hunters.

"His eyes weren't black like Dean's eyes are green," Sam said, starting with the easy part. "They were black all over. The part that's usually white, too."

"I saw him when he was talking to Liz. His eyes were perfectly normal."

"Yes, when you were talking to him," Sam said. "He can change them."

"Wait, what? Like, like contacts?"

"No, Chris. He can just change them. Probably does it to scare people. He's…" and here it came, here was the part where she wasn't going to believe us and we'd have to scare the hell out of her to keep her quiet while we looked for Liz…

And Chris's phone buzzed.

She looked down at it, as startled as we were. "Oh God, it's from Liz." It was a text message and she read it quickly, her eyebrows drawing together in confusion. "What the hell?" She tilted the phone so Sam and I could see it. It said _QXB 7? blue._

"Plate number," Sam and I said in unison. "It must not have taken her phone," Sam continued.

"It?" Chris said.

"Uh, yeah," Sam said. "Look, with this we can find her, OK? I swear. I swear to you, Chris." She looked at him, stared into his eyes, and I held my breath.

"Fine," she said. "I'm crazy, but fine." She looked down at her phone again, then back up at me. "What do we do?"

*…*…*

We went back to her place after all, with a quick swing by the motel to pick up Sam's laptop. Sam was flipping the thing open practically as we walked in the door, and I spent a few minutes convincing Chris to go change out of her club outfit while he fell into the rabbit hole of whatever he does to make computers his bitch. Then I made coffee. And then, there was nothing to do but wait.

First he went into the phone company. Liz's phone had lost signal not long after she got the message out to Chris, and she hadn't had the GPS on anyway, but he worked out the three cell towers it had been closest to when it went out. Armed with the general area, he burned an access to the Illinois DMV to look at plate records—he tried to explain to me once why ins like that only worked a few times, but I don't have that kind of brain—and out of the hundred possible QXB-7s only one had an address close.

By then it was getting light out. When Sam had the address, I went and shook Chris awake from where she'd dozed off on her couch, to tell her we were going to get Liz. And that turned into a whole new problem, because she was determined to come along. We went back and forth for about ten minutes, me getting louder all the time which I knew was not the way to go, but it was coming up on twenty four hours since I'd had any real sleep, and I'd hit my second wind by then but that didn't make it easier to hang on to my temper. Finally we compromised on her coming, but staying in the car to be ready to call for help if we needed it, by which I meant if Liz needed it, because hey—a SWAT team might actually be able to get her out if the demon killed us, right?

*…*…*

The neighborhood was nice—almost suburban, every house with its own little backyard and some with honest-to-God picket fences. There were kids going by us on the way to school and guys walking their dogs, and it was all so _nice_ it made my teeth hurt.

I used to live in a place like that, but that was when I was too young to know that the world isn't safe.

We parked the Impala a block from the address. Chris called my phone and I stuck it in my pocket so she could hear us, and we set up a system of checkins; if we missed two in a row or told her to, she'd hang up on me and call the cops. And though she looked mutinous when I told her to, eventually she agreed to cut and run if she saw the guy from the club.

Sammy and I loaded up as inconspicuously as we could. Nice suburban neighborhoods don't take it well when you show up carting shotguns in broad daylight, so we put the iron in a duffel for transport. Chris's eyes got huge when she got a load of the trunk.

"This is what we do," I said. Chris just nodded. Then we were done, possession-wards hung around our necks (and it occurred to me we ought to do something to make those harder to lose), bottles of holy water in our pockets, salt and iron and memorized Latin, and I put my hands on her shoulders. "We're gonna get Liz back," I said, and hoped to hell I wasn't lying.

We went in through the back, from the little alley that fed the yards and garages. There was a privacy fence around our target's, but that wasn't unusual. We cracked the gate, took in that there wasn't anything like cover, and just went up to the back door as fast as we could. Sam popped the lock in a few seconds; I can pick locks, but he's got a talent for it. When we were kids, Dad used to reset the combination on a safe lock and challenge him to see how fast he could open it.

The door gave onto a kitchen. We went in fast and closed the door behind us, and I opened the duffel and tossed Sam his gun. The kitchen was set up, but nothing was working; it'd look OK to someone glancing through the window but it was clear the demon didn't use it—and why should it? They don't have to eat.

"Dean," Sam said, and nodded at the welcome mat we were standing on. It had a pattern woven into it in dark brown on light, a familiar pattern: a devil's trap.

"What the hell?" I muttered.

"Guess it doesn't want any other demons coming in to play," Sam said in the same low tone. "On the rug like that, it can move it."

I nodded at him. "OK, upstairs or down?" he asked.

Like that was even a question. "You know this kind of thing always goes for the creepy basement," I said, and he tilted his head to concede the point.

"Probably that door," he said, jerking his chin at it. We set up to either side, shotguns pointed, and Sam reached out his hand to open the door—and from the other side, muffled but clear, I heard a woman start to scream. Liz.

"Shit!" Sam exclaimed. I could see him wanting to charge in, hell I wanted to myself, but he just pulled the door quietly open. The steps went down and then made a right-angle turn, so we couldn't see what was at the bottom, aside from a glow of orange light. I glanced at the lightswitch in the wall, decided not to risk warning the demon, and Sam and I started down the stairs, quick but quiet. We stopped a step up from the turn and I put one eye around the corner.

The place was all set up, the kind of thing you read about in books on torture-killers. There were racks, honest-to-God _racks_, and Liz was stretched out on one of them. Or at least, it was a woman, and her hair was the right color; I couldn't see her whole face. She was still screaming through the gag in her mouth.

The problem was, she wasn't alone. There were two guys in there with her. One of them was _tall_, fuckin' taller than Sammy, though skinnier than my brother by a long shot. He wore a long black leather coat and carried a weird carved walking stick that made me think of the old guy in those elf movies Sam liked. He was heading for Liz, quick. The other one was closer to my height, and…OK, look. I like girls pretty much, but this guy? Even under these circumstances, he was so hot it was distracting. And he was scanning the room in a familiar way, checking for threats; I pulled my head back just before he'd have seen me. Neither of them was the demon. I held my hand up with two fingers, so Sam would know what we were dealing with.

"OK, OK, I've got you," one of the men was saying. "It's OK. We'll get you out of here." I glanced at Sam and saw he looked just as confused as I felt. Where the _fuck_ had these two come from?

"I'm going to check upstairs, Harry," the other guy said. That tore it. We had about a second to decide how we were going to introduce ourselves. I saw Sam think it over in a flash and come to a decision. He opened his mouth, checked me, and I nodded.

"There are two of us up here," he said. From below, instant silence broken only by Liz, who was crying now. There was a long pause.

"Who's that?" said the guy who'd been coming up.

"Our names are Sam and Dean," Sam said. "We came to find Liz." Another pause. I could imagine the frantic, non-verbal conferring that must be going on.

"Come around the corner. Hands up," the other guy, Harry, said at last.

OK, fair enough. I didn't put my gun down, though, and neither did Sam, just shifted our grips as we stepped down to the landing.

The hot guy was pointing a Desert Eagle at us. The tall guy, standing directly between us and Liz, was pointing…a stick. It was maybe eighteen inches long and as big around as my thumb. But he handled it like a weapon, so I figured maybe he knew something we didn't. They both tensed when they saw our guns.

"No one do anything they're gonna regret," I said.


	3. Trust but Verify

Thomas and I stared at the men on the landing for a long second. Neither of them was the black-eyed thing; both of them were tall, one around Thomas's height and the other a few inches taller, though still shorter than me. They were well-muscled and good looking, and though they were younger than me by several years they carried their guns with an ease that only comes from long familiarity. The shorter one waited a few seconds, and then sighed.

"So I get that you don't trust us," he said, "but I think it might be a good idea if we did our not trusting each other somewhere else. That dem—guy could get back any second." Thomas's eyes flicked my way at the slip of the tongue.

"Why don't you tell us why you're here first?" Thomas said.

"You guys are hunters, right?" the tall one asked. "You followed the, uh, guy here?" Something about how he said it made me think he didn't mean "hunters" in the sense of orange safety vests and deer blinds.

Behind me, the woman gasped. I'd only gotten her gag out before our new friends had shown up, and since I was standing between her and the potential threat all she could see was the back of my coat—assuming she even had her eyes open. "Sam?" she said, sounding incredulous. The big man twitched, and his friend put out a steadying hand to stop him.

"Yeah, Liz," he said evenly. "You're OK, we're here."

"Sam. Get me out of here. Please get me out of here, please…" She started to cry harder, most of her words barely comprehensible. Thomas and I shared a thoughtful look, and finally he made a hell-with-it face and holstered his gun. "We'll do the not trusting somewhere else," I said.

*…*…*

Thomas went upstairs with the shorter guy, who by process of elimination had to be Dean, while Sam and I got the woman out of her restraints. Fortunately the keys were sitting on the tool chest—along with a lot of other implements I didn't look at too closely. Whatever she'd been wearing, it was reduced to useless rags now, but Sam shrugged out of one of his shirts and helped her into it. She wasn't a small girl, but it fit her like a tent and fell almost to her knees.

The shirt covered most of the injuries, which was good, because I was having a hell of a time keeping my temper. I know it's not logical-Murphy points it out all the time-but I hate it when women get hurt. Sam seemed to have similar feelings, if the look on his face was any guide, and it made me like him better. Liz leaned on him heavily but refused to be carried. We achieved the first floor, which looked exactly the same as I remembered. Thomas and Dean stood in the kitchen, looking uneasy; or rather, Thomas looked uneasy and Dean appeared to be about to vibrate right through the floor.

As soon as he saw Sam, he said, "OK, who's staying?"

Thomas and I stared at him. He sighed and said, "When the guy gets back, someone's gotta be here to gank him. He's gonna be pissed when he realizes we got Liz out, and we can't let him go on any roaring rampages of revenge if you know what I mean." Thomas met my eyes and mouthed _Gank?_ at me, but Dean had a point.

We went through quick negotiations. Liz didn't want to go without Sam, and we decided that it was probably a good idea if she and her roommate didn't go home for a while; it seemed logical to take them to Thomas's place, which was large and reasonably secure. So Dean and I were elected to stay. He and Sam had a brief, mostly wordless argument that boiled down to Sam not wanting to leave him alone with me and Dean insisting he'd be fine. I revised my opinion of their relationship; these two had either been partners for longer than they'd been adults, or they were brothers.

Sam and Liz went out the back, followed by Thomas. My brother skirted the weird doormat, and I saw Dean notice that with narrowed eyes. Once they were gone, Dean and I stared at each other for a second.

"Okay," he said. "I'm thinking we set up in the basement, wait for him there."

I leaned on my staff and studied him. He and Sam were confusing the hell out of me. They talked and moved like professionals, but professional _what_, exactly? "So when Sam asked if we were hunters, I kind of got the feeling he didn't want to know if I like venison," I remarked. Dean looked immensely frustrated, and I realized he was just as confused by us as we were by him.

"Yeah," he said, visibly deciding to just go for it and what the hell. "We hunt…things. Monsters. Vampires, shapeshifters." He watched me closely, waiting for me to tell him he was crazy.

"That's…not a career with a long life expectancy," I said, and he blinked. Me, I was picturing these two boys, with nothing but shotguns and bravado, going up against something like Mavra. My mental movie didn't end well for them.

"OK, but you're telling me you guys _aren't_ hunters." I nodded. "Then…how did you get here? Why aren't you telling me I'm nuts?"

"Let's just say I've seen some things," I said. "You're right, we should get to a better position, but I take it you know what we're dealing with here?"

Dean sighed. "Yeah. He's a demon."

I stared at him. "No, he's really not," I said after a second. "Trust me on this one, demons don't look like that."

I actually know this from personal experience. I have seen demons, even summoned one or two in my time. Generally they don't look anything like human; sometimes they don't look like any one kind of animal at all.

"You're OK with vampires and shapeshifters, but _He's a demon_ is too far?" Dean asked. "He's got the black eyes and the attitude and he set up the devil's traps so he can move 'em to come into the house; I don't know what more you want."

"Devil's traps, is that what's on those rugs?" I was going to have to tell Bob all about this. For one thing, the circles on the rugs weren't empowered in any way I could detect, but they'd still caught Thomas with _something_. And I knew Dean's attitude: this was his job, and it was one he was good at-even though nothing he was talking about was quite _right_.

"Yeah," Dean said, and turned to leave the kitchen. "Look, we can debate it once we have things set up, OK?"

Setting things up turned out to involve going down into the basement and starting to draw on the carpet of the landing with a paint-stick Dean pulled from his pocket; it was slow going because he seemed very concerned with making sure the line was continuous. As he worked he threw a few dubious glances at my staff and finally said, "Do you know how to use a gun?"

I grinned at him and pulled my .45 out of my pocket. It's a big gun, but I'm a big guy. "OK then," he said, sounding marginally relieved. "That won't slow him down much, but it's better than nothing."

"If a gun's not going to slow him down, why do you have one?" I asked, feeling a little slighted.

"Mine's loaded with salt, which I'm guessing yours isn't," he said. He finished a large circle and started a second inside it, and I realized he was recreating the pattern from the doormats.

"Salt?"

"Rock salt. Works on a whole lot of creepy crawlies, demons included." He shook his head. "How do you not know this stuff?"

That was a damn good question, but I didn't know the answer so I pretended it was rhetorical. "So demon. Really?" It was possible that he was just calling the whatever-it-was by the wrong name.

"Yes, really," Dean replied.

"And that's going to?"

He stopped, a hand flat on the floor for balance while he filled in one of the squiggles (which, now that I looked at it, did kind of resemble a few binding runes I'd seen). The look on his face suggested I was a little slow. "Devil's trap. It'll trap him," he said, patiently. "Then we can whip out the exorcism and he'll be on his way back downstairs."

OK, this was a new idea; if Dean was a practitioner he was hiding it _very_ well. For one thing, he and Sam both had cell phones, which didn't rule out a minor talent but anything significant would fry the electronics regularly. "You're going to do a spell?" I said. I knew I sounded skeptical, and there was a twinge of worry starting in my guts.

Dean let out an exasperated sigh. "Dude, you wanna just let me finish this? It won't hold him if it's not complete."

"True," said a new voice. Its owner was just suddenly there, standing in the middle of Dean's unfinished pattern. I spent a moment trying to spot the rift from the Nevernever he'd come out of (with no luck), so Dean reacted more quickly; he dropped his paint stick and grabbed for his gun.

The man flung out a hand and the gun spun away from Dean as if it had been shoved. He went after it, and the man's eyes—solid black, just like the descriptions—tracked the movement. I took advantage of his distraction to level my staff at him.

After all, two can play at that game.

"_Forzare!_" I snapped, and force slammed into him, throwing him against the wall of the stairwell. He let out a surprised "Oof" but recovered quickly. His gaze settled on me and his eyes narrowed. "You don't belong here," he said.

"Neither do you," Dean said, and pulled the trigger. In the confined space the sound of the shot was painfully loud. The black-eyed man staggered again, but didn't drop, and I began to worry. A close-range blast from a shotgun, even one loaded with salt, is nothing to be sneezed at. "Keep him off me," Dean said, and began to recite, in Latin. "_Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus_—"

The words were kind of familiar, though my Latin is only so-so and I couldn't spare the concentration to figure out what it meant. I didn't recognize the text he was using, but he seemed confident enough; I just wished I had a better idea how much time he needed. On the other hand, he'd asked for a distraction and I am—he said modestly—pretty good at distractions.

I drew my blasting rod as the man launched himself in Dean's direction. "_Fuego," _I said. The line of fire swept across the black-eyed man's path; he hissed in pain or anger as he passed through it. And Dean stopped talking. I spared him a glance; he was staring at me in shock. "Keep going," I said, and he shook his head sharply as he opened his mouth again.

"Don't bother," the man said. "I think this meat has outlived its usefulness anyway." Dean talked faster, but he only made it through another word or two before the man threw his head back and…

OK, so it was a new one on me. Black smoke, full of tiny flashes of lightning, emerged from the man's open mouth and gathered over his head, roiling in a way that made me faintly sick to watch. I got over the shock enough to sent another dart of fire at it, but it dodged easily. After a moment the smoke ceased to emerge; the mass swirled, appearing to gather itself, and then darted for the covered force-field thing on the wall. It went under the curtain and vanished. The man, meanwhile, dropped to the floor like a sack of rocks.

Dean cursed. I glanced at him again on my way to checking the fallen man; Dean was staring at me, and he looked like it wasn't going to take much to convince him I was dangerous.

Well, I am dangerous, but not to him.

I didn't have to check for a pulse to determine that there was no helping the man who'd been housing the smoke. Even as I watched, gashes and bruises were appearing on every exposed bit of his skin, as if the smoke had been hiding them somehow. There were two bullet holes in his forehead, as if the rest of the trauma I could see hadn't been enough.

"So…demon," I said slowly.

"Yeah," Dean said. "What was that, with the fire?"

I sighed. "I'm a wizard," I said.

"A wizard," Dean said flatly. And then his face changed. "A wizard named _Harry_?"

He started to laugh. I glared at him. I hate those books.


	4. Darkly

I got it back together in a few seconds, for two reasons. One, Harry-the-wizard was giving me a really epic stinkeye, and two, we kinda needed to see where the demon went. I wasn't wild about having a guy at my back who was from the weird side of the tracks, but he'd had plenty of chances to make a play for me if he wanted to and hadn't done it yet, so I decided to just put that whole discussion on hold.

"Does it have a tunnel or something under there?" I said. The curtain the demon had gone under was hung from a rod; I got there in a few steps and pushed it back.

Underneath, there was a…glowing…thing. It looked like the cell doors on Star Trek that you could only see when someone was touching them, except not going away. It was about as wide as a door, but only a little taller than me.

"What the hell is that?" I asked. Harry came up to stand beside me. "Got me," he said. "Thomas and I touched it, but it didn't seem to do anything."

"You touched that on purpose? Because that doesn't look like a disintegrator field or anything."

"We heard Liz screaming," Harry said. He looked a little embarrassed. It was weird having to crane my neck even more than when I look at Sam.

"Yeah, why did that make you touch the glowing thing?" I asked. Harry had a look on his face that I recognized from seeing it on Sam. He trying to put together the pieces of something, but they weren't fitting yet. I was drawing breath to ask another question when my cell phone rang.

"Yeah, Sam."

"Little problem here," my brother said. "Thomas says he can't find his car or Harry's, and his cell isn't working. He can turn it on but it won't pick up coverage."

"Well, demon-boy showed up, but Harry and I made him dump his meatsuit and retreat," I said. "Not much way to track him right now. We'll meet you at the Impala, okay? It'll be a minute, I need to finish drawing a trap here in case he comes back. And Sam, keep an eye out." To Harry and Thomas, it'd sound like a generic warning about the demon. Sam would know what I meant, though: Be careful, these guys might not be on the up-and-up.

Harry could produce fire out of thin air. I'd seen Thomas go around the devil's trap. I was inclined to trust them because of the way they'd been dealing with Liz before they knew we were there, but there was no reason to be stupid about it.

"Gotcha," Sam said. "Hurry it up, though. I want to get Liz out of the street."

"Sit her in the car with Chris till we get there," I said, and hung up as Sam acknowledged me.

I went back over to the landing, talking as I went. "Sam says your buddy can't find your cars and he's having trouble with his phone." The paint stick was where I'd dropped it, at least. I grabbed it and prepared to start painting again, and then Harry said, "Oh," in a way that meant _I am an idiot for not having figured this out before._ I turned to look at him, just in time to see it as he stepped into the glowing thing and vanished.

A second or two later, he reappeared.

"It's a door," he said. I knew I was staring at him like the biggest dork in creation but I couldn't stop. "It's not like a portal into the Nevernever—" I added 'What's a Nevernever' to my rapidly growing list of _what the fuck_ "—but it's a door. On the other side of it, there's a basement that looks just like this, except stuff's not arranged quite the same and _you_ aren't there." He looked confused for a second, and I was really glad I wasn't the only one. "That's…wow, really hard to think about."

"Dude, look," I said. "I'm gonna need you to give this to me in words of one frickin' syllable, OK? Because it sounds like you're telling me that's, like, a portal to another universe."

Harry looked at me, surprised and trying to hide it, and said a little slow, "That's...exactly what I'm telling you. You got that from what I said?" I tried not to feel insulted. I mean, I get that Sam's the giant brain of the family, but that doesn't mean I'm _stupid_.

And you know, I watch TV.

"Yeah," I said, turning back to the half-drawn trap on the landing. "I mean I guess it's not a full-on 'Mirror, Mirror' thing, because then you and Tom would be us, only with goatees. But it makes sense." I was still planning on having a serious freak-out later, as soon as I had the time.

Harry made a sound that I thought was supposed to be a laugh. I felt for him. This was weird, even by me and Sammy's standards. "How does it make sense?"

I painted as fast as I could. "Look, I've never even _heard_ of anyone who can do that thing you did with your..." Crap, there really wasn't any other good word for it, was there? I gritted my teeth and finished, "wand. That was freaking _fire_ out of the _air, _dude. Even demons don't pull that shit. And 'wizard'? Witches, sure, with their nasty-ass bodily fluid all over the place thing, but wizards? You're down with vampires and shapeshifters, but you've never even seen a devil's trap and you don't know about salt and plus? You just walked into the wall and back out. So yeah, it makes sense." I stopped talking. Looked like the stress was building up ever-so-slightly more than I realized. I finished the next-to-last symbol (I think of it as "funny looks-left guy") and turned to glance at Harry, who was staring at me.

"'Mirror, Mirror'?" he said.

"Yeah. It was a _Star Trek-_"

"I've seen it," Harry said. "But what makes you so sure Thomas and I are the ones from the evil universe?" I looked at him again, and he was actually grinning a little.

I grinned back.

*.*

I had enough salt in the duffel for two lines around the portal, though Harry bitched a little about them and the devil's trap, something about how they weren't empowered so they shouldn't keep anything out. We drew traps on the floor inside both doors too, much easier on hardwood and linoleum than carpet. I really, really wanted to keep the black-eyed son of a bitch limited to _one _version of Chicago if I could possibly make it happen, and though Harry probably wasn't too happy that it was in his world rather than ours he was smart enough to know we needed a planning session more than anything else right now.

Once that was done we booked it back to the Impala. Chris and Liz were inside; Sam and Tom were leaning on the car, trying to look like a couple of guys shooting the breeze. Tom was doing a pretty good job of it, and probably so was Sam if you weren't me. They both relaxed a notch when they spotted us.

It took a few minutes to get us all into the car, because we had two women, two guys and two freaking giants. And my baby, she's a big girl (especially by the standards of the coffins they call cars these days), but she's not infinite. We ended up with Harry in the passenger seat with Chris on his lap and Liz sort of draped over Sam and Tom in the back.

"OK. Where we going?" I asked once we were all situated.

"We found out that Thomas's building doesn't know his name while we were waiting for you guys," Sam said. "We probably still shouldn't go back to Chris and Liz's place, so..."

I sighed. "Motel it is."

We made the trip in mostly silence, on the pretext of letting Liz rest. Harry and I hadn't really conferred much on the whole portal-between-universes thing, but I at least was pretty clear that I didn't want to have to try explaining it to Sam while a couple of civilians were listening.

We made it back with no incident, me following every traffic law to the letter because I couldn't afford to get pulled over with six people crammed into the car. Fortunately one of the rooms next to the one Sam and I already had was open, so we installed Liz in it, with Chris to keep an eye on her; Sam spent a few minutes going over her injuries. None of them were bad enough to need stitches, which I thought was kind of weird until it occurred to me that the demon would want to keep her alive as long as it could-dead people can't feel pain. Once I thought about that, I felt sick.

That son of a bitch needed to die so much, and we were gonna have to settle for just sending it back downstairs unless Sam's little stalker showed up.

While Sam put Neosporin and bandages on things, I salted the door and windows. Liz hadn't been really with it since we'd gotten to her and no one was surprised when she fell asleep; Chris was OK with staying with her, so we decamped back to our original room.

Which Tom was inside, so that meant he'd gone over the salt line. I had no idea what his deal was. He and Harry stopped talking when we opened the door, but I was actually kind of OK with that; they had the right to be wary of us too.

"So," Sam said as soon as he closed the door. "What happened?" Harry was sitting on my bed and Tom in one of the chairs at the tiny table; I took the other chair and Sam decided to hold up the wall, his arms crossed.

"The demon showed before I had a trap drawn, Harry and I fought him off, he decided to ditch the meatsuit and run," I said. "But that's not the interesting part." Sam raised his eyebrows at me. "No, seriously. Harry. He's not gonna believe this if I just tell him."

Harry and Tom traded a look and a shrug that was almost too faint to see, and Harry said, "Do you guys have a candle or cigarettes or something?"

"Candle?" Sam asked, his eyebrows climbing towards his hairline. I nodded at him and he pushed off from the wall, wearing his _This had better be good _face, and went over to the supply bag. He pulled out one of the cheap paraffin candles and a holder, stuck the former in the latter, and at Harry's nod set it on the table.

"OK," Harry said. And then he gestured at the candle and muttered (no shit) "_Flickum bicus._" The candle burst into flame.

I was sorta prepared, and it still made me blink. Sam literally gaped. He stood frozen, but his eyes flicked to me. "I think we're OK, Sam," I said, and watched Tom and Harry out of the corners of my eyes. They were tense but not aggressive.

"He just did magic," Sam said, "and you think we're OK." And he had a point; normally I'd be the one pointing guns and demanding answers. But Sam hadn't seen Harry fighting the demon, and I had.

"So the other thing you aren't going to believe," I said. "There was something in that basement you didn't see." I locked eyes with him, to make sure he understood I was not shitting him. "There was a door down there. A door to somewhere else."


	5. Cards on the Table

"Somewhere…else," Sam said, and sighed. "Dean. You're gonna have to get a little more specific." He returned to where he'd been leaning. He still looked wary of us—and I hadn't missed the way Dean was keeping an eye on us either, but I thought that was because he didn't want us to react badly if Sam did.

It was like one of those comics where two super-teams meet up and fight, without the spandex. I was sure Thomas and I could demolish them if we had to, but _I_ wasn't going to start that fight.

"There's a thing in the basement that goes between, I don't know, dimensions or something," Dean said, and Sam's eyebrows appeared to be trying to migrate right off his face. "Harry and Tom here are from the other one."

There was a long pause. Sam's eyes flicked over Dean's face, assessing, and seemed to be satisfied with what they found; he looked at me and then at Thomas, who was by this point also staring at me.

Thomas found his voice first. "Harry, you want to fill _me _in?" he asked a little sharply. I ran back over the little we'd discussed while the boys were installing Chris and Liz in the other room, and realized guiltily that I hadn't gotten to that part. I had thought the demon—I was using Dean's word since it seemed to be something from his _world_—was more important, but also…it was really hard to think about the portal, for some reason. It was almost surprising me, every time Dean mentioned it. My mind shied away from the concept.

"Remember, we were in the basement, and we heard the screaming," I said. Thomas nodded. "Where was it coming from?"

"It was coming from the glowing thing in the wall," Thomas said slowly. "And when we touched it…"

"We were still in the basement," I said, "except it was a different basement." Thomas's brow furrowed (which on him looked good, damn it) and I could tell he was having the same problem I was.

"Interdimensional portals," Sam said, his voice heavy with incredulity. "Interdimensional portals, seriously?"

"C'mon, Sammy, we've had weirder," Dean said, and Sam fixed him with a glare.

"No, we really haven't," he said. After a second, Dean shrugged, conceding the point.

"Doesn't really matter, though," he said. "What matters is that there's still a demon out there. Or…I dunno, _over_ there. It went through the thing. Harry and I salted and trapped, but I'm assuming Chicago-Two is just as big as this one, and we don't know what it looks like any more."

"Yeah," I said. "What was with that guy? The smoke came out of him and he just…dropped. Dead before he hit the floor." We were going to have to do something about the body, too, though Dean and I had settled for closing its eyes and covering it with a tarp.

"He was probably dead long before that, or would've been," Sam said; I gave him a questioning look. Dean said, "Pretend they're hunters who've just never met one before."

Sam sighed again. "Right, OK. It's a demon. It's possessing, was possessing, the man who you saw. It's stronger than a human. It has limited telekinesis and it can teleport." He paused to check that Thomas and I both knew _telekinesis_ meant _can move things with its mind_ before continuing. "While it's possessing someone, very few things will appear to hurt it, but the damage is still there; once it leaves, the injuries come back, and if they're lethal, the person dies." Sam was warming to his topic now, and I was thinking of the time Thomas had gotten close enough to, he claimed, shoot the damn thing in the head. Looked like he'd actually hit it, if the bullet holes in the dead man's forehead had been any indication.

"What are the 'very few things'?" Thomas asked. He sounded pretty casual, but I caught the speculative glance Dean threw him.

"Well, the usuals," Sam said. "Salt, iron. Holy water. The name of Christ doesn't hurt them, but it'll make them show their eyes—you know about the eyes?" We both nodded. "They can't cross a salt line, but if you have to trap one it's safer to draw a devil's trap. Once you have it trapped, you can exorcize it." He paused and grimaced. "Or you can try that when it's not trapped, but that's, let's just go with 'way harder'." He and Dean traded a look that spoke of bitter experience.

Thomas asked, "How do you know all this?"

Dean said, "We're hunters. We hunt stuff. It's kind of our job." He was completely casual about it, as he had been back at the house. Thomas looked at me, and I could see him running the same kind of scenario I had.

"How do you get _that_ job?" I asked. I mean, I kind of have it too, but you know. I'm a wizard. As far as I could tell, Sam and Dean were both normal young men.

After a second, Dean said, "Our dad was a hunter. We grew up in it." His face warned me not to enquire further. Messed-up family dynamics I get, not to mention the telltale 'was', so I let it drop.

"What about you guys?" Sam put in. "How did you light a candle with…with _dog Latin_?" He seemed a little indignant.

"I told your brother this already," I said. "I'm a wizard."

"Don't laugh, he's sensitive about his name," Dean said in a stage whisper, and grinned at me when I glared.

"Dean," Sam said quellingly, though his lips twitched.

"To answer your question," I said to Sam, "the words aren't the important thing. What matters is that they aren't the words I'd usually use just talking. I have a friend who would do the same thing by saying _khat nedjes_." I was sure I was mangling Elaine's preferred Egyptian, but that didn't matter for these purposes.

"So wait, is everyone a wizard over there?" Dean asked, suddenly more interested. Sam looked slightly pained, probably at the reminder that there was an "over there" to worry about.

"No," Thomas said. "I'm not, for instance. It's an inborn thing. Tends to run in families, but it's pretty rare." I had gotten it from our mother, in fact, but Thomas's father's vampire heritage had quashed any chance he had of inheriting the trait.

"So if you gave me your, uh, wand," Dean said, "I wouldn't be able to make fire come out of it." Sam blinked at him, then turned to me.

"You wouldn't," I agreed. "But it's not a wand, it's a blasting rod." In illustration I removed the rod from my coat, pointed it into the air where no one was sitting, and muttered, "_Fuego._"

Sam tried really hard to jump back into the wall at the plume of fire, though it was a lot smaller than anything I'd have used in a real fight. Dean was more relaxed, but I suspected that was only because he'd seen it before. Sam's eyes were huge as I put the blasting rod away again. I felt a little sick to my stomach for a moment, but the feeling faded quickly.

"That is why I'm telling you there's an _interdimensional portal_, Sam," Dean said, mimicking his brother's tone on the words. "I dunno about you, but I've never even heard of anyone who could do stuff like that. The rules have gotta be different there."

"For one thing, you keep setting up circles and not empowering them," I agreed. "And that guy, that demon...no one on our side of the gate knows what the hell he is. We've been dealing with him for years. The cops think he's a serial killer."

"Technically he is," Sam said.

"What he is, is on his way back to Hell when we catch up to him," Dean said.

Sam eyed him and said, "How are we supposed to catch up to him? He could be anywhere in Chicago—any_one_ in Chicago. I don't feel like sitting in that basement waiting for him to try and come back."

"I might be able to help with that," I said. They turned to me, and I grinned. "I am a wizard, after all."


	6. The Other Side

Harry claimed he'd be able to do a tracking spell using the body the demon had been riding, as long as we didn't wait too long to go back. Sam gave me a skeptical look, but when I shrugged at him he did the head thing that meant he was going to let me make the call here. Which meant that he'd added up all the info and come to his own conclusion, and if I picked different than he would I'd get hell for it, of course, but you know.

At the same time, Sam knows I've got a head for people, more than he does in some ways. (_Some_ ways. I, after all, was the idiot who liked that murdering asshole Gordon the first time we met him. Even I make mistakes, OK?) Tom was still giving me the willies for some reason, but Harry really didn't. Even with his fire thing, even with the way he never quite met our eyes right, which didn't strike me as shifty so much as some kind of self-defense, like an autistic kid.

First things first, though. "How long is too long?" I asked Harry. "Because me and Sam've been running since yesterday morning and if you want us to go straight after this thing we should get some sleep first." I'd gotten forty winks while Sam was cracking the phone company, but it was nothing like enough and Sam was worse off—and if I didn't rest, he wouldn't either.

"With as long as it was using the body…as long as I get the spell cast before sunrise it'll be fine," Harry said, but then he looked uncertain. "Unless it possessing someone else is a problem. I don't know the rules for this. I wish I had Bob here."

"Bob?" Sam asked, before I could.

"Friend of mine. Knows a lot about magic," Harry said.

"Older guy?" I asked. "Mechanic for his day job, wears a trucker cap all the time?" Because that would just be too freakin' funny, if somehow Bobby was into the weird stuff on both sides. But Harry was shaking his head, smiling. "Older, yeah, but Bob…doesn't do much manual labor. I guess I could put a hat on him though."

"So you're saying either we've got most of a day to sleep, or we should go right now," Sam said. Harry nodded, and Sam and I shared unhappy looks. We were well over 24 hours awake now, and both of us with fights on top of it—Sam's more like getting beaten up, which didn't help at all. We're in good shape, and with coffee we were functional, but I really didn't want to go after a demon on "functional". Trying to hunt when you're tired is stupid and dangerous, and insomniac hunters don't last.

"Why don't we go get things rolling and you guys can rest while Harry and I do some legwork?" Tom said. He'd been pretty quiet for the conversation, though I could tell he wasn't zoning out or anything. Harry perked up a little. "If we go back to my place I can get a fix on it in my lab. _And_ ask Bob what he knows."

*…*…*

We checked in on Liz and Chris, and told them we were probably going to be out of touch for a while. Well, we told Chris; Liz was still asleep. Then we got into the car and headed back to the house with the creepy basement. This time I parked on its dedicated spot, since we didn't have to worry about sneaking up.

When we opened the door, Tom stopped short, gazing at the floor—the floor where Harry and I had drawn the devil's trap. There was an uneasy pause. Harry looked concerned, Tom looked annoyed, and Sam and I shared glances. "OK," I said. "We gotta know. What's your deal, Tom?"

He and Harry had a conversation like Sam and I have all the time, the kind that's almost all in the eyebrows. It ended with Harry making a "Your call" face so clear even I could read it, and Tom said, "I'm White Court." That was obviously supposed to mean something to us, because he and Harry both got a little tense.

"OK?" Sam said. I was a little gratified that he was as confused as me; Sam has this habit of pulling stuff out of his ass from books we both read two hundred years ago and making fun of me for not remembering it.

Tom said, "White Court vampire. Raith, to be precise."

I looked around. Despite being cold enough to make our breath visible, the sky was clear blue and the sun had made it over the level of nearby roofs; Tom was standing in full sun with no sign at all of discomfort.

"So…I'm thinking this is one of those things where the rules are different," I said. "Because if you're a vampire, you ought to be running for cover. And what does that have to do with devil's traps anyway?"

Yeah, I should've been a little more concerned, probably. On the other hand, there was Lenore and her people, and I had no clear idea what being a vampire even meant on the other side. (Was the too-sexy-for-my-shirt thing part of it?) He'd shown no sign of trying to eat Liz, even when she was actively bleeding.

And damn it, I was _tired_.

I still caught the moment when Tom and Harry both remembered about the gate, though, and it occurred to me to wonder why they were having trouble with that and I wasn't. Probably a question for another time.

Tom shrugged and said, "I don't know, but when we went into the other house it felt like getting punched in the stomach." He made an unhappy face. "It kind of…made me hungry."

Creepy.

I also had the feeling there was a little more to it than Tom was telling us, but since the big picture was one I could live with I didn't push. He clearly had the Buffy's-boyfriend vampire-with-a-soul thing going. Still, I'd keep an eye on him. In the meantime, standing out in the cold wasn't doing any of us any good, so I leaned down and scratched out a segment of the line.

*…*…*

Going through the gate turned out to be kind of a letdown. No flashes of light or funny noises or shocks or anything, we just touched it and some of the stuff in the basement flickered into new positions.

But even as I was thinking that, Sam and I both staggered. All of a sudden I felt like I had weights on my back—like I'd been awake for two or three days instead of one. The feeling let up quickly, but not all the way.

"Wow," Sam said. Harry had a hand on his arm, offering support, and I realized Tom was standing ready to catch me if I went down. They both looked somehow better than they had a second ago. Meanwhile, Sam looked punch-drunk, and I could tell I did too. "Yeah," I agreed with my brother.

"What's wrong?" Harry asked.

"We touched the…thing," I said, too slowly, "and now I feel like crap." I paused to think about it. "More like crap."

"OK," Tom said. He sounded brisk and rested and for a second I hated him for it, the way you hate anyone who can sleep when you're lying awake. "Time to get you guys back to Harry's place."

They'd come in separate cars. It took me a second to remember why my baby wasn't parked out back—but it wasn't hard to decide how to get where we were going; Harry had a Volkswagen friggin' Beetle that looked like it was held together with duct tape and string, and Sam would've had to basically get in the fetal position to fit in it. So we both went in Tom's gigantic douche-mobile instead.

I don't approve of the trend for small cars, but this thing probably weighed four of the Impala. I have limits. Besides, it had so many gadgets it was pretty much a computer with wheels, and that kind of thing is not cool.

I know I dozed a little on the trip, and Sam needed the sleep more than I did. When I woke up enough to pay attention again, we were pulling up outside a large, old two-story. Harry's place was in the basement, with dedicated steps down from the outside. He led us down and unlocked the door. He swung it open with what looked like a little bit of effort, and was immediately body-checked by the biggest damn cat I've ever seen. The cat accepted a moment of attention from Harry, then stalked off with feline dignity. And then, just over his threshold, Harry was greeted by a dog.

At least, I was pretty sure it was a dog, because they tend to get weird when you try to keep a dinosaur in an apartment.

Seriously, the animal's shoulder was about at my waist level, and I may not be a giant like Sam but I'm not a short guy. It was gunmetal gray all over, except for slightly darker ears and paws, and it had huge, intelligent eyes that sized me up instantly. I could tell it didn't think I was a threat, which was probably good because I didn't really have the energy for fighting off something that looked like someone put a Saint Bernard through the enlarger.

"Damn," I said. Harry grinned at me. "This is Mouse," he said. "He's technically a Tibetan mastiff, but I like to think of him as my own personal tank." Mouse sat down and offered a doggy grin of his own and a paw to shake. Sam, of course, was all over that action. He knelt, smiling, and everything was fine till he touched the paw; then Mouse went still and his pleasant demeanor dropped like a sandbag. He didn't growl or anything, but all of a sudden he was eyeing my little brother like he was dangerous. My hand itched for my gun.

Harry took this in with raised eyebrows and said, still pleasantly, "Looks like Thomas isn't the only one with some full disclosure in order." Sam and I exchanged confused looks, and then he winced. "It's the blood thing," he said grimly. "Has to be."

"Blood thing," Harry said.

"When I was a baby," Sam said. "A demon. It's dead now, but for a while I had its blood in my system." He sounded miserable about it, the way he always did.

"We got the son of a bitch, Sammy," I said quietly, and he managed half a smile. "Look," I said to Harry. "We can go back to the motel—or I mean, get a motel if you want."

The pause before he replied was almost too long, but only almost. "No, it's OK. Mouse, Sam's a friend, OK?" I swear the dog looked doubtful, but he also relaxed most of the way.

We pushed through the door at last, shaking off the cold. The apartment wasn't big, nor well-lit even when Harry did his casual candle-lighting thing again (instead of turning on the light switch in the wall), but it was comfortable-looking; there were rugs on the floor, the couch looked long enough for someone Harry's size to sleep on, and most of the wall space was covered in bookshelves. It smelled like wood-smoke from the large fireplace, which had a banked bed of embers.

"One of you can take my bed," Harry said, waving at one of the doors in the side wall. "The couch is good to sleep on, too. I'm gonna go down to my lab, see if I can get a bead on our guy. Thomas, build up the fire, huh?"

I didn't bother checking to see if Tom agreed; Sam settled the question of who was taking the couch by going to sit on it. He was moving like he was underwater, and I was pretty sure I was no better.

I got my boots off before I was too tired to move, at least. Harry's bed was narrow, but I just didn't care. I fell asleep seconds after my head hit the pillow.

I woke to Sam's hand on my shoulder, and batted it away. "Sleeping," I said, not too clearly.

"Up and at 'em, Dean," he said. He sounded way too cheerful; Sammy's always had a talent for getting by on not enough sleep. It was a damn good thing when I first got him from Stanford, too, because of the nightmares. These days he's better, what with Yellow-Eyes having bitten the big one.

If I could I'd kill that fucker again. Once would've been enough for Mom, but then he had to go and mess with my little brother too.

"Don't wanna," I said, and Sam shook me again as I tried to roll away from him.

"We've had six hours, dude, time to go talk shop."

Six hours? Crap. "OK, I'm awake," I said, and reluctantly sat up to prove it. I felt about a hundred times better than I had before, but still a little tiny bit off. My sleep schedule was so screwed.

When I got out into the living room, Harry had coffee made. The mug he handed me was black with a picture of a gold ring on the side. There were red curlicues on the curve of the ring that looked like letters, but not for any language I read. "Sam said you take it black," Harry said.

"Yeah," I replied. "If you put stuff _in_ the coffee, you end up with more coffee." I took a sip. It was just this side of too hot to drink. "This is great, thanks." Tom was sitting on an overstuffed chair; I went and sat next to Sam on the couch. Harry, his own mug in hand, dropped onto a leather-covered ottoman. Out of his heavy coat he was almost skinny, his jeans and t-shirt a little loose on him. And he was still wearing a glove on his left hand, but not his right. I thought it was kind of weird till I noticed a couple of shiny scars that peeked out from under the cuff. And now that I thought about it, he was even clumsier with his left than most right-handers; if he'd burned it badly, it probably wasn't pretty.

"OK," he said. "The good news is, I can track the demon."

"I hate that phrase," Sam said, sour, and Harry nodded sympathetically. I gulped more of my coffee. "Yeah. The bad news is, I think it's already possessed someone else, and that means my connection's going to fade fast—at dawn, maybe earlier."

"You should have woken us up sooner," I said sharply. "We can't let our only lead on this thing go just so we can sleep."

Harry fixed me with a stare. "Dean, you two were practically falling over. The connection isn't fading yet, and I'd've said something if it did."

I scowled, but he had a point. We'd both been dead on our feet. Way more dead than we should have been, actually. Even now I had that hollow feeling under my breastbone that you get when you wake up too early.

"OK," Sam said soothingly. "Doesn't matter now. We needed the sleep, and we've still got a lead on it, right? So we're good."

"Yeah, OK," I said, and scrubbed my hand over my face. "I just wish I felt like I was all the way awake. This is starting to freak me out—six hours, I should be all set." I drank most of my remaining coffee, just to get more caffeine into my system.

Sam nodded agreement. "I feel better," he said, "but not as good as I should. I mean, I'm good to go, just not perfect."

"We don't have time to wait for perfect," I said. "You guys should memorize the exorcism."


	7. One Solved Problem

Before we left, Sam and Dean insisted that Thomas and I put on necklaces that they said were charms to keep the demon from possessing us. I was pretty sure Thomas, at least, didn't need one, but it seemed easier to just wear the things—which, once again, had no detectable magic on them. Their designs included pentacles, at least, so that was a step in the right direction.

This time we took Mouse. He seemed to have gotten over his dislike of Sam, though I noticed he had a tendency to want to stay between Sam and me. Since Dean was trying to stay between Sam and Thomas, it made for some interesting maneuvers.

Mouse and I took the Beetle; Sam and Dean went in Thomas's battleship. I led, with the compass I'd bound the tracking spell into sitting on the passenger seat. It wouldn't last long, but I didn't have to maintain it the way I would if I used my pentacle.

It was a long trip; Chicago sits on some of the flattest real estate in the US, and it sprawls. There's no really good way of putting a range-finder into a spell like the one I'd used, either, so all I could do was drive until the compass needle started swinging quickly. When it did, we were in another pleasant residential neighborhood. It was a nice change from the usual abandoned warehouse kind of thing bad guys tended to go for, I had to admit, but it meant we were going to stand out like a collection of sore thumbs again. At least it was after dark by then.

It took a few minutes of walking to pinpoint the house; unlike the last one, it didn't give me any bad feelings. It looked like just a house. There were lights on.

We split up. Dean and Mouse and I stayed on the back door, while Sam and Thomas went to the front. I could tell Dean wasn't happy about that arrangement, but the demon had seen me and him; the ones it hadn't seen had to do the talking till we could get into the house.

There was a swingset in the back yard. I was bracing myself for what that could mean.

Through the window in the back door we could see a small mudroom and a step up to a kitchen. There wasn't any movement I could spot as Dean bent to pick the lock, which he did with casual ease. As he was finishing, the doorbell rang as planned.

Nothing happened. After a minute, Thomas and Sam rang again. Still nothing. They rang a third time, and suddenly a woman appeared in the slice of kitchen Dean and I could see. She had her back to us, fortunately, and hurried away in the direction of the front door. I glanced at Dean and he nodded and eased the door open. The three of us squeezed into the mudroom, kind of a tight fit. Faintly I could hear the woman—demon, she'd appeared out of thin air—saying that no, there hadn't been any suspicious characters hanging around. Then Sam's voice, reassuring; Thomas was trying to be unobtrusive, since he'd been close to our target a few times, if a while ago. Not that my brother's good at being unobtrusive, but it was the best we had.

Sam was apologizing for interrupting the evening and the demon was cheerfully telling him that was all right. I guess it's sad that I deal with this kind of thing enough that I _heard_ the exact moment she stopped pretending. "Oh, it's fine," she said. "I'd let you talk to my husband too, but I'm afraid he's a little tied up at the moment." At the tone of her voice Dean and I exchanged looks and started moving, Mouse at my heels. There were a couple of thuds.

We burst into the living room to find Sam heaving to his feet where he'd clearly been thrown against a wall and Thomas grappling with the woman. She looked startled and angry and her wide eyes were flat black. Sam coughed and started to speak the exorcism. The demon snarled into Thomas's face and did something that made him curse and jerk and lose his grip. The demon flung a hand out at Sam and he went back into the wall again, hard, and stopped speaking.

"Sam!" Dean snapped, and leveled his shotgun, but he didn't have a chance to fire it before a gray streak passed us both and barreled into the demon. She went over backwards with Mouse planted on her chest. He was growling, almost too deep to hear but I could feel it vibrating in my chest. The sound got a little louder when he opened his mouth, and then my dog set his jaws over the possessed woman's throat.

For a second, no one moved. Mouse did not bite, but I could see the demon pushing at him ineffectually. When that didn't work, she let her head fall back, like the last body had done when the smoke tried to escape, and I tensed. But nothing happened.

Beside me Dean shook himself and moved, pulling a piece of chalk out of his pocket. He crouched next to Mouse and the demon (who looked confused as all get out) and started drawing on the hardwood floor. Thomas caught my eye and said, "I'm going to go look for the rest of the family." I nodded and he departed in the direction of the kitchen again. Sam got to his feet again and leaned on the couch, watching Mouse with fascination.

Dean shuffled around the demon and Mouse, drawing on the floor as he went. At first no one spoke, but then Dean moved into the demon's line of sight. "Wait a second," she said, in a tone of surprise and delight that sounded really weird coming from someone pinned to the floor by a hundred fifty pounds of dogasaurus. "You're Dean Winchester, aren't you?" Sam went completely still. Dean paused in his drawing for a second and then glanced at the possessed woman with his expression carefully blank.

"You are," she said, and laughed. "This is great."

"Sam, help me with this," Dean said tightly. Sam nodded and pulled out his own chalk.

"I thought there was something about you, back on the other side," the demon said. _Other side?_ I thought, but then I remembered again. "Oh, Dean, there are such _plans _for you, you have no idea."

Sam looked up from his careful drawing to glare at the demon and said, "Well, you're not gonna get your plans, so shut the hell up." He sounded venomous, furious, nothing at all like the mild young man I'd been seeing so far.

"Interesting turn of phrase. Dean's gonna love Hell, Sam. Once the boss gets hold of him, the way he's gonna _scream_, it'll be like—" She choked and stopped talking as Mouse tightened his grip on her throat, and just in time; Sam was staring at her with an expression I recognized. He was about a hair's breadth from murder.

"Sam," Dean said, soft but firm. Sam's gaze snapped from the possessed woman to his brother, who continued, "Let's get this done and we can send this bitch back downstairs."

For a second I wasn't sure it was going to work, but then Sam nodded and looked down at his drawing again. They both chalked the floor in silence until the whole diagram was finished, and then Dean looked up at me. "Think you're gonna have to get your dog to let go," he said. "From the looks of it he's keeping her from getting out." He cast an appreciative glance over Mouse. "You know where we can get one of those? Because that's a handy trick." Sam had backed away from the devil's trap, looking deeply unhappy.

"I ended up with him by accident," I said. "OK, Mouse, let her up." Mouse's whole posture was dubious, but he loosened his grip and sprang out of the circle, landing next to me with his surprising grace. The demon sat up and rubbed at her throat theatrically even as Sam started reciting again.

The woman twitched as Sam spoke, her motions unnatural, but she smirked through what appeared to be pain. "You can't save him, Sam," she gasped. "Wherever you send me, Dean will end up there too, you know that."

"Shut up," Dean growled, and she rolled her eyes to look at him. Sam talked faster. The demon laughed, cruel and desperate. "So scared," she said. "You're so scared, and you should be. You can't imagine what it's like, and it'll be worse for you, Dean, because you're special."

"Shut _up._" Dean's face was a perfect blank, but he was losing color even as I watched him; winter-pale already, the result made him look half-dead.

"You can't make me," the demon said, trying for a sing-song taunt and missing it by inches. "I can tell you all about Hell, Dean, what it's going to be like, I can—" The possessed woman's voice cut off as Sam rapped out, "_Audi nos!_" Her head tilted back and her mouth opened and this time the smoke poured out, swirling around her head and then down to the floor.

It wasn't exactly the weirdest thing I've ever seen, but it was maybe in the top ten; the smoke seethed over the wood, appearing to sink in somehow. It left a strange burnt mark that started to fade almost immediately. Meanwhile the possessed woman collapsed, though without the utter bonelessness of the demon's first host.

I was drawing breath to ask what the demon had been talking about when the woman shoved herself up again, blinked, and demanded, "What the hell was that?" And then she burst into tears.

* * *

><p>It took a while to get everything under control. The woman's husband and two kids had been in the basement, wrapped in clothesline and duct tape; they were all bruised, but we'd gotten there before anything worse happened. I had a feeling there was going to be some tension in the family for a while, but there was frankly nothing we could do about it, aside from assuring them that this wouldn't be happening again.<p>

Finally we got out of there. Dean and Sam went in Thomas's car again, so I had the whole drive back to think about everything the demon had said, and the more I thought the less I liked it.

There are ways to dedicate yourself to dark powers. None of them end well.

So we arrived at my apartment. The brothers were starting to look dead on their feet again, which was all the excuse I needed to get them inside rather than taking them straight back. (My thoughts skipped over back to _what_ exactly for a second. Why was the damn portal so hard to remember?) I had a quiet word with Thomas and he left for home after extracting a promise that we'd get together to celebrate later.

I'm not any good at subtle, so as I was hanging my duster up I just asked, "OK, what was the demon talking about?" Neither of them answered right away. I turned and found them in the midst of another wordless argument. Finally Sam said, "Just tell him. Maybe he can help."

"No one's allowed to help, Sam," Dean said.

"The rules are different here," Sam replied with the air of someone who's just produced a trump card. Dean's jaw set stubbornly and Sam said, "Come on. Just ask. If reading a book doesn't count, neither does asking."

"I don't think this is a good idea," Dean said stubbornly, and Sam clearly decided to pull out the bug guns; his expression went pleading and he said simply, "Please, Dean."

For a second I thought it hadn't worked, but then Dean's shoulders slumped minutely. "Fine, OK, but I need a beer for this."

"That I can do," I said, and went to the icebox to pull out three bottles. (That is not a figure of speech. My icebox uses actual ice.) Mac would be appalled if he knew what I do to his beer, but I'm enough of a philistine to prefer it cold.

When we were all seated and our bottles opened, Mouse contented on the floor near me, Dean drew a deep breath. "OK. Do you know about crossroads deals?"

It took a second to track down the bell that phrase rang in my memory. "You mean like deals with the Devil?" The brothers both nodded. "There was a guy, Robert Johnson, who was supposed to have sold his soul at a crossroads in exchange for becoming a great guitarist."

"Yeah," Dean said. "We're pretty sure he actually did that. You take a box and put, well, some stuff in it, and bury it at a crossroads, and the crossroads demon shows up. The demon gives you what you want, and you get ten years to enjoy it. And then the hellhounds show up and drag your soul to Hell."

Now, I have never claimed to be the smartest guy in the room, but Dean's expression was carefully blank, Sam's was full of concern and fear, and I had to clear my throat to ask, "How long do you have?"

"Four months," Dean said flatly, and I stared at him appalled. He couldn't be more than thirty; ten years ago he'd have been... "You were just a kid," I blurted.

He came up with a tight smile that didn't get anywhere near his eyes. "It's not that bad," he said. "My demon only gave me a year. Us Winchesters, we caused them a lot of trouble, so when I came beggin' she got her kicks cutting down my time. I was all grown up."

"What the he—what was _worth_ that?"

"Nothing," Sam said, at the same moment Dean said, "Sam." They both stopped and glared at each other for a second, and then Dean continued, "Sam was dead. There was nothing else I could do."

I sat back, my beer bottle dangling from my hand. "You made a deal with the Devil to bring Sam back from the dead," I said carefully.

"I made a deal with _a_ devil," Dean said, with an attempt at levity that fell completely flat. "A demon, anyway. She was a crappy kisser, too."

I looked at Sam. He sure didn't look like he'd been dead at any point. He was watching Dean with terrible intensity, like he was trying to memorize him. Dean either didn't notice or was used to it.

"OK," I said. "I think I need to talk to my assistant about this." I set my bottle on the table and headed for the trapdoor that leads to my lab. "You keep your assistant in your basement?" Dean asked behind me as I started down the ladder.

"Bob, wake up," I said. On the only uncluttered shelf, orange light sprang to life in the eye sockets of a human skull. "Yeah, Boss," said Bob.

My lab assistant is a spirit of intellect. He knows pretty much everything there is to know about magic, which as you might imagine is pretty handy in my line of work. I just have to keep him happy. Mostly that means providing him with cheap romance novels and the occasional Playboy.

"Those guys who helped me with the black-eyed thing have a problem and I think it's out of my league."

"You say that like it's a surprise," Bob said cheerfully.

"Don't get smart," I growled as I reached for his skull.

"I can't help it," Bob shot back. Then, as I grabbed the skull, "Hey, you mean you want me to talk to them? You sure that's a good idea?"

"They aren't from around here," I said.

"OK," Bob said, sounding extremely dubious.

Back in my living room I took the few steps to reach the coffee table and set the skull on it. "Dean, Sam, meet my assistant Bob," I said. Neither of them spoke until finally Bob said, "So…hi."

Both brothers jumped a little, and then Dean sighed. "Your assistant is a talking skull? You take this wizard thing way too seriously, dude."

"He's a spirit of intellect, just bound to the skull."

"He's also sitting right here," Bob put in. "So I hear you guys have a problem. How can my immense intellect help you today?" He managed to convey the impression of clapping his hands together and rubbing them in anticipation, a hell of a trick for a guy who doesn't even have eyebrows.

"I sold my soul to a crossroads demon to save Sam's life," Dean said, with the air of a man who has decided to embrace the weird. Sam was just staring at Bob in clear fascination.

"Whoa," Bob said. "That actually works where you come from?" Dean nodded. "OK, first tell me how you get in touch with the demon."

For the next half an hour, Sam and Dean talked. They gave Bob the details of the summoning ritual (I refused to call it a spell, since once again there was no evidence that any power at all was raised; it was just a matter of getting the right items and performing the right actions) and the details of the deal itself. Bob coaxed a surprisingly detailed account of the actual conversation with the demon out of Dean—or perhaps it wasn't surprising. I think I'd remember selling my soul for what remained of my life, too.

I asked a few questions, but didn't bother taking notes. Bob would be able to quote me chapter and verse on request. Finally, Bob said, "OK, I think this is about all we can get this way. From here, a little direct observation is required."

"Uh, OK," Dean said, spreading his hands out a bit. "I'm here, observe me."

"No," Bob said in his I'm-surrounded-by-idiot tone. It was sort of gratifying to hear it aimed at someone other than me. "We need to look at your soul."

Dean said warily, "Yeah. OK. How are you gonna do that?"

"I'm not. He is," Bob replied. Dean and Sam looked at me. I sighed.

"It's a wizard thing," I explained. "If I hold eye contact with someone for too long, it happens. It's called a soulgaze." I shrugged. "It's pretty much exactly what it says on the label: we see each other's souls."

Dean and Sam exchanged doubtful glances. I agreed with them. "Bob, are you sure this is necessary?"

"It'll give us more to work with, Boss," Bob said. "As it is I'm not sure what to try except throwing curse-breakers at him to see what sticks, and if one did it'd probably count as weaseling."

"Which would kill Sam," Dean said. He looked resigned, but not surprised; Sam just looked crushed.

"This soulgaze thing, does it hurt?" Dean asked after a second. When I looked at him, startled, he was watching Sam, who was staring at his own hands.

"No," I said slowly. "But it's _souls_. It's kind of…intimate." I know I made a little bit of a face—I am, after all, a guy—and Dean caught it and grinned at me. "Don't worry, I'm good at not calling after," he said, and Sam snorted.

I was pretty sure I didn't want the story there.

"Fine, OK, let's do this," I said. "Just get comfortable, and don't look away." I gave him a second to get settled, and then I looked him straight in the eyes. They were mossy green, a little apprehensive, and that was all I registered before I fell into them.

At first, I only saw fire. The roar of it drowned all other sounds. Smoke filled my nose and mouth, choking and bitter, the terrible miasma of a house-fire instead of friendly woodsmoke. I blinked and shook my head and suddenly there was a little boy in front of me. He was four, perhaps five at the most—Dean. A man shoved a bundle of blankets into his small arms and snapped, "Take your brother outside as fast as you can—don't look back!" The little boy just stood there, in a clear agony of indecision, and the man's voice slid into desperation. "Now, Dean! _Go!_" Dean turned. In the wavering firelight I could see tears tracking down his cheeks. The bundle he carried wailed as he ran.

As he went he wavered, shifted, and the world around him changed too; without ever being able to pinpoint a moment of change I found myself looking at Dean as I knew him now, a young man in his prime. He still wore his leather jacket, though it looked more like armor than it had in real life. The little bronze pendant on his necklace shone slightly. He had a shotgun in one hand and a bowie knife in the other, and he stood a few steps from the ancient black car we'd gone to the motel in. Sleeping peacefully in the back seat was a boy, maybe eight or nine, who I was sure had to be Sam. And on the edge of the sourceless pool of light that centered on the car, monsters prowled. Dean watched them warily but with no fear. He looked like he was prepared to stand there forever, if that was what it took.

But around one wrist there was an iron shackle, digging cruelly tight into the flesh. Sigils twisted on it sickeningly, throbbing a dull red that reminded me of infected wounds and old blood. As I watched, Dean rubbed at it with his other hand, though he didn't turn his vigilance away from the immediate threats. I studied the sigils as closely as I could. Like everything else about Sam and Dean, they were familiar but a little skewed and I found myself cataloguing them by their differences from symbols I knew.

They said _debt_ and _pain_ and _deadline_, and other things I didn't want to consider too much, but I made myself remember.

I could feel the grip of the soulgaze easing and committed new sigils to memory as fast as I could. Dean started to fade, and right before I lost the connection completely I heard him ask softly, "Who's gonna look out for Sammy when I die?"


	8. You Don't Have to Go Home

Harry and I came out of it at about the same time, I think, but he handled it better. He was used to it, I guess. I wasn't.

I didn't feel sick or anything, but I was freaked out and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Anyone would be.

"You OK?" Sam asked quietly, as I slumped in my seat. I managed to keep my voice steady when I answered him.

"Yeah, just…intense. No big deal."

He didn't say anything but I had the feeling this was another one that was gonna get dragged out later. I tried not to let Harry see me roll my eyes. Then again he probably knew I wanted to, if he'd seen me in anything like the detail I'd seen him.

Meanwhile Harry had picked up a pad of paper and was drawing on it. The skull seemed to be watching him intently, though I have no clue how I could tell—it wasn't like anything moved. (I could hear Dad shouting at me that I was out of my freakin' mind, trusting this guy who was a witch and kept a ghost and hung out with vampires, but Dad hadn't seen Harry's soul and I had. Besides which, Dad was dead so he didn't get a vote.)

"That's messed up," the skull said, as Harry finished drawing one of his squiggles—they didn't mean anything to me, but going by the look on his face they did to him, and it wasn't good.

"They were all like this," Harry said. "Just a little off from how I know 'em."

"Well, yeah, but I meant that's _messed up_," the skull replied. "Gross. Nasty. Unpleasant. The kind of thing where they take your—"

"_Bob_," Harry snapped, and the skull stopped talking. "Just...what can you do with it?"

"It's a pretty standard marker," the skull said, sounding a little more subdued. "There's a longer version of the contract somewhere, spelling out what the terms and conditions are, and if I know my stuff—which I do—it's probably pretty elaborate. Hellspawn are almost as good as faeries for that kind of thing. What you have here is just the...beacon. It marks your soul—" and suddenly the skull was talking straight to me "—so they can find you when it's time to collect."

"Great," Sam said thinly. "Can you _break _it?"

"I think it would be pretty simple," Harry said. But he wasn't smiling while he said it. "It would take shoving a lot of power into it, but I can do a lot of power and it wouldn't have to be subtle."

"Which is good, Boss, because you suck at subtle," said the skull. Harry narrowed his eyes at it.

"Then do it!" Sam said. "Break it. Now."

Harry didn't quite bite his lip, but he looked like he wanted to. "Breaking the marker would break the contract, Sam," he said.

"So what?"

It's not like Sam to be stupid. All I could figure was that he was pretending not to understand on purpose. "If we break the contract, you die," I said.

"Dean," Sam started.

"Damn it, Sam, did you not hear what I said? 'If you try to welch or weasel your way out, Sam drops dead.' What part of that seems confusing to you?"

"The part where you aren't even trying!" Sam yelled, so suddenly that Harry swayed back a little. Sam lunged to his feet and took a step towards me, his fists shaking at his sides. "The part where you think I'm more important than you!"

I couldn't really stand up; Sam was looming over me so that if I did I'd be close enough to kiss him. But I could frown at him and cross my arms, so I did. "That's my _job_," I retorted. "Has been since I was four and you never complained about it before."

"God_damn_ it, Dean—"

"Guys!" Harry said loudly. Sam jumped a little and we both turned to look at the wizard (and that was not getting any less weird). Harry pasted a smile on his face and said, "I understand that this is a thing for you guys, but shouting isn't going to fix it, OK?"

The skull muttered, "You should talk"; Harry ignored it in favor of looking at Sam, who took a deep breath and let it out again. "You're right," Sam said. He stepped back and dropped into his spot on the couch again, rubbing at his temples with both hands, elbows on his knees. Which I didn't like; that was what he used to do when he was having visions. After a second he sat up straight and said, "What if we were over here?"

I stared at him. "I mean, we have four months," he went on, getting more and more enthusiastic as he talked. "We could keep looking, but if it gets close and we don't have anything, we could come back here."

"They'd be able to track you," Harry said. "The marker would lead them to the gate, and we already know they can go through it—our demon was going back and forth all the time." He hesitated just a tiny bit before he said "gate", and then it took me a second to remember what he was talking about. It just wanted to slip out of my memory. Which had not happened on the other side, so it had to be something about going through it that messed you up.

"Fine," Sam said. "What if we _closed_ the gate?"

Harry and the skull didn't say anything for a second. "I'd have to take a look at it," the skull said slowly. "Or at least get a really good description."

"I think you should do that," Harry said. "If I can close it without blowing up the block, I'm gonna want to. Who knows what's been going back and forth through there?" Sam looked like he was about to say something and Harry went on, "I'll make sure you're on the side you want to be when I do. The problem is, I'd bet my duster I won't be able to open it again once it's closed. Permanent spellwork like this is usually pretty easy to take down, it's complex so it's fragile, but putting it back up is another story."

Sam slumped. "If it's safe on this side, though," he said. "We could…we have some time. We could say goodbye to Bobby, go and collect a few things from Dad's lockup." He looked at me, doing the puppy dog eyes as hard as he could. "There's gotta be stuff to hunt here, too, Dean."

And because he's my little brother, I was actually considering it, right up until the skull said, "Wait, no, you can't _stay_ here."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Basically, because you don't belong here," the skull said. "There's a lot of reasons, none of which I am going to be able to explain to you, but it boils down to staying here would kill you, drain you like one of the Whites." Harry winced at that, which the skull didn't seem to notice. "Pretty fast too—less than a month, probably. You'd just…waste away."

I thought about it. I'd been tired when we touched the gate, but when we came out I'd felt like I was about to fall asleep where I stood. Even sleeping hadn't helped as much as it should have, and I was already way more bushed than I should have been. I looked at Sam and saw him doing the same math and not liking the taste of it.

"And I'm gonna bet that being over here for the exact second the deal's due won't help. Not even if we can close the gate and reopen it to go home after," I said. I sounded a little pissed, I think.

"Probably not," Harry said, sounding apologetic. "There are two likely results of that: either it would count as breaking the deal, or it just wouldn't matter at all, it'd just be delayed. Either way, something bad would happen as soon as we opened the gate to send you back."

"Second one, probably," I said. "We ran into a guy who knew the deal and he had himself all warded up, but as soon as the wards broke the hounds got him."

We all sat there for a second, thinking about that, and then Sam said, "_Fuck_," and stood up again.

"Sammy," I said, and without turning around he snapped, "Just give me a second, Dean!" He stomped over to the bathroom door past the dog. Mouse picked up his huge head to watch Sam go; Sam totally ignored him, which told me a little something. Sam really likes dogs, way more than I do—they're not bad, but I'd have a cat instead except cats make me sneeze. I mean, assuming a couple of guys who live in a car could have pets.

Anyway Sam went right past the dog and into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him hard enough to qualify as a slam. Harry and I sat there for a second. "Uh, sorry about that?" I said.

Harry shrugged and picked up his beer, which still had a couple of swallows left in it. He looked down at it. "He's upset," he said. "I can't say I blame him. It sucks. Someone does something like this for you..."

"Yeah," I said. Harry's eyes came up. I grimaced. "My dad. About a year and a half ago. There was...a semi hit us. Hospital didn't think I was gonna make it." There had been more to it than that, but I didn't really feel like giving Harry our whole fucked-up family story.

Harry sighed and looked back at his bottle. Mouse heaved himself to his feet and came over to lay his head over Harry's knee. "A friend of mine traded himself to some very bad people for me," Harry said quietly. He put his hand on the dog's head and ruffled his ears. "If you know, why'd you do it?"

It was my turn to pick up my bottle and fiddle with it, even though mine was empty. "You saw why," I said.

"I saw why it started," Harry said. "I didn't see why you think you still have to."

I turned the bottle back and forth between my hands for a couple seconds. "It's my job," I said. "That's all I got, man. It's my job."

Harry didn't say anything else and we just sat there till Sam came out of the bathroom.

* * *

><p>After that the skull decided that it wanted to see the gate-thingy for itself. That turned out to be all kinds of fun, because of course my baby wasn't there. There is <em>no<em> good way to put three guys who are all over six feet into a Beetle to begin with, and when we added Mouse things ended up kind of cramped. By which I mean I was in the back seat with two hundred pounds of dog half in my lap while Sam had his knees jammed up under his chin in shotgun.

"Dude, why do you own this car?" I asked. From the far (very, very far) side of Mouse, Harry said, "Because I can't drive anything with a computer in it. The magic doesn't like high tech."

We went around a corner and Mouse lost his balance and fell into me. We both went _oof_. "That doesn't mean you have to own something you can't even sit up straight in. It's not like my car has any fricking microchips."

"I couldn't afford to maintain your car," Harry said.

"You could still get something bigger."

"I _like_ my car," Harry said. He sounded a little offended.

"It's not even all—"

"Dean, shut up," Sam said. He thought it was funny, the bitch.

* * *

><p>It was getting on to midnight by the time Sam opened the back door for us again, and I could feel it. I mean, I spend a lot of time awake in the middle of the night; I'm used to it. But I didn't feel used to it.<p>

As soon as Harry took it…him? The voice sounded like a guy...out of the bag, the skull said, "Hoo boy. This place is—"

"Yeah," Harry said. "Wait till you see the basement."

"You saw the ley line?"

"Kinda hard to miss."

I looked at Sam and mouthed _Ley line?_ at him, and he made the face that means he can't believe how ignorant I am, so I had a lecture to look forward to later, oh joy. In the meantime we all trooped down to the basement. Mouse's hackles were up, and I couldn't blame him. The curtain covering the gate was still pushed to the side. The skull let out a low whistle, which was actually kind of creepy since it, you know, didn't have lips.

"So you want the good news or the bad news?"

Harry closed his eyes and said, "Bad news first."

The skull said, "I don't think it happened from this side. I mean, look at the edges. They kinda blow this way." I looked at the edges. They looked totally flat.

"I'm going to leave the looking to you for now," Harry said, but his face was relaxing a little.

"Since I actually understand it, good plan," said the skull. Harry rapped on it with his knuckles.

"Is that all?" he asked.

"Well, no. The thing is, I'm not sure someone did a spell to make this happen. It might be…a natural phenomenon, for lack of a better term."

Harry tightened up again, and Sam didn't look pleased either.

"What's that mean?" I asked, because sometimes you just gotta throw yourself on the grenade. All three of them started to answer me, stopped, and traded looks; apparently Sam won at rock-paper-scissors because he was the one who said, "It means this kind of thing might just _happen_. Randomly. If there's a ley line—"

"Yeah," Harry picked up. "It's not a big line, but it goes _right_ through here. Anything that uses power could tap it, even if they didn't know quite what they were doing. In fact I'll bet that's what happened—the demon had its little dungeon all set up on your side, and one day the combination of the ley line and the power from what it was doing just blew a hole through. Usually people tapping ley energy have a purpose for it, but undirected…" He stopped talking and we all stared at the gate for a second.

Finally the skull said, "The good news is, it'll be really easy to break. No one put any interesting traps on it or anything."

Harry sucked in air and let it out again. "Do I need anything special?"

"Not really," said the skull. "Lemme show you which corner to pry loose." Harry seemed to know what that meant because he pulled a wire-bound notebook out of his pocket and flipped it to a blank page. After a second squiggles started appearing on it, neat like they were printed but coming out of nowhere like holding invisible ink over a stove burner. It was _seriously_ creepy. The squiggles still didn't mean anything to me, or to Sam from the look on his face, but Harry nodded and made _hmm_ noises for about a minute.

Finally he nodded like he'd figured something out and said, "So if I do it in this order, it'll just seal up, like a portal into the Nevernever." I still didn't know what a nevernever was, but it didn't seem like a good time to ask.

"Yes," said the skull.

"OK," Harry said. "Remind me to buy you some new magazines."

"Oooh!" the skull said. "There's a new issue of B.A.B. out, Boss, and I know a place that's open 24 hours—"

"Yeah, yeah," Harry said, frowning. "Tomorrow. I'm not buying you porn at one am." The skull managed to convey the impression of sulking.

"Your skull reads porn?" I said.

Harry shrugged. "Don't ask me what a guy with no body gets out of it. OK. Here's what I recommend. We'll get your bags out of the Beetle and you guys go back to your side." Sam opened his mouth to argue and Harry held up one hand. "I need a couple days to ask around about Dean's...problem, but I don't think it's a good idea for you two to stick around here that long. I'll meet you back here in, say, four days. If I have anything useful then, I'll let you know. Sound good?"

"Sure," I said. "We need to go make sure Chris and Liz are OK anyway."

Harry hesitated, which was a weird look on him; he was a pretty straightforward guy, as far as I could tell. "Look," he said, and though he was talking to both of us I knew the words were really meant for Sam. "I just don't think you should get your hopes up. This kind of thing is usually pretty ironclad. I can ask, but if Bob doesn't know how to get out of this, you have to prepare yourselves for the possibility that there just isn't any way. OK?"

We both said OK, but I could tell Sam didn't actually mean it. It was gonna crush him—again—when Harry didn't have a magic way out of the damn deal.

And I mean, better crushed than dead, but that didn't mean I had to like it.

We went and got our bags, firmed up our plans to meet Harry, and stepped into the glowing gate again. As soon as we hit the other side, I felt better. I was tired, but it was the normal tired of being up a little late; I didn't feel like I was about to fall asleep on my feet.

On the parking pad out back, my baby was waiting patiently. I patted the roof as we got in and ignored Sam rolling his eyes.


End file.
